Music in Review: Flourishes From Denmark, Stockhausen’s ‘Stimmung’ and Marc-André Hamelin

DANISH STRING QUARTET

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Alice Tully Hall

Anyone listening to the Danish String Quartet for the first time on Friday evening didn’t have to wait long to figure out what all the raves have been about. From the start of the opening work, Haydn’s Quartet in C (Op. 54, No. 2), to its hushed ending, the group exhibited a remarkable smoothness and balance that left ample room for strong individuality.

Alert to Haydn’s many surprises and twists, the players — Rune Tonsgaard Sorensen and Frederik Oland, violinists; Asbjorn Norgaard, violist; and Fredrik Sjolin, cellist — lent a deeply, almost comically, tragic cast to the little trio section of the Menuetto.

Then, happily, they seconded the Danish National Symphony, which at its recent Carnegie Hall appearance proselytized for their great compatriot Carl Nielsen, performing his Quartet No. 4. Here the individuality came to the fore in an imaginative display of tone colors, the quartet making a wholly persuasive case for a powerful work seldom heard hereabouts.

Only in the final piece, Brahms’s burly Piano Quintet, with Jon Kimura Parker as pianist, did the Danish players show their age, or rather their youth. As Mr. Parker tried to stir drama in the opening movements, the quartet seemed still to be concentrating on beauty and blend of sound, an unusual approach to this music, though one not without its rewards.

But the Scherzo and the Finale seemed to pull the performers together in common purpose and passion, bringing the concert to a triumphal conclusion. JAMES R. OESTREICH

THEATER OF VOICES

‘Stimmung’

Zankel Hall

Stockhausen composed his sprawling vocal sextet “Stimmung” in a house overlooking the frozen Long Island Sound late in the winter of 1968. The weather then likely wasn’t much different than that on Saturday evening — cold, snowy and windy — when Theater of Voices gave a rare performance of the mystical, sensual, above all warming work at Zankel Hall.

“Stimmung” is both simple and not: a continuous 72-minute set of variations on a single note, a low B-flat. Their voices curling upward with the metallic twang of throat singing, the six vocalists gradually explore the note’s overtones, forming elusive, slippery chords dotted through with whispers, whistles and babble.

Excerpts from Stockhausen’s erotic poetry are intoned, as are the days of the week, in both English and German. Periodically exotic words are announced: these are “magic names,” drawn from lists of the gods in mythologies from around the world.

Saturday’s performance brought out the humor and charm in a work that can sometimes feel forbiddingly recondite or merely meditative. Its tempo, volume and mood malleable, “Stimmung,” performed here at a low table with a globe of light in the middle, has a lightness and agility of tone that rescue it from being just a dated remnant of the trippy 1960s.

The founder and director of Theater of Voices, Paul Hillier, worked with Stockhausen on this so-called “Copenhagen” version of the score, which the group recorded on Harmonia Mundi and clearly relishes. Its performance was confident and luminous, controlled yet free, both playful and solemn. ZACHARY WOOLFE

MARC-ANDRé HAMELIN

92nd Street Y

Is it possible for a pianist to be too good? If anyone faces jeopardy with that question, it’s Marc-André Hamelin.

This emperor of the keyboard has long ventured through outrageously demanding thickets deep in the borderlands of the repertoire, capturing Godowsky and Busoni, Dukas and Alkan. For him, no work seems too challenging.

So in his concert at the 92nd Street Y on Saturday, a listener knew what he held back when bestowing his lordly refinement on John Field’s “Andante inédit,” a suave, ambiguous work of delicate porcelain, and on Debussy’s “Images” (Book II), for which he reserved silken gloss and an impossibly pellucid touch. Only briefly in the recital’s first half did Mr. Hamelin unleash his most startling power, in his own “Chaconne,” a frosty set of variations that deals in brutal poundings and ghostly apparitions.

So this concert was like a long flirtation, a courtship destined to end in the extraordinary virtuosity of Liszt’s “Venezia e Napoli” — its “Gondoliera” glimmering, its “Tarantella” shocking with correctness — and what Mr. Hamelin called the “monkey business” of Chopin’s “Minute” Waltz, an encore he deconstructs into a whirl of wrong notes and a fleeting, devilish nod to Johann Strauss.

But on the way, Liszt’s “Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude” left me wondering.

Outwardly miraculous, beneath the surface it felt as if each note’s every possibility had been considered in advance, then ensconced in a pianism of total authority. But without a sense of risk, even the most pristine of interpretations risks being too perfect for the concert stage. DAVID ALLEN

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